Team Admiral Dolphin

GovHack 2013 Tasmania

The team page for Team Admiral Dolphin from GovHack 2013. Team Admiral Dolphin is based in Hobart, Tasmania.

Overview

Marvellous Ultimate Appliance is an electronic card game featuring over 13,000 cards designed to help raise awareness of the energy consumed by common household appliances. Drawing on the data provided by the E3 Program (http://www.energyrating.gov.au), the game is inspired by popular battle card games such as “Magic: The Gathering”; the data is used to provide stats for cards, representing each appliance in the E3 Program database.

The key pieces of data used are the energy star rating, capacity, and running cost (derived from the kWh consumption per year). The project was conceived by the team after exploring the available datasets, as a way of making people more aware of the power consumption, energy usage, and cost-to-capacity implications of typical consumer appliances. The game is styled as a battle of appliances between neighbours, competing to spend their money on the largest, most efficient, and effective appliances. The dataset used was intriguing, because whilst extremely interesting, it was not presented in a way that made the team compelled to understand it, or make use of the knowledge it gave them. Therefore, this project presents components of the data in entertaining and highly compelling ways. It is hoped that this vivid presentation will inspire players of the game to learn and understand about their appliances, and how they impact energy usage and its flow-on effects. We made it into a game and uploaded it via the NBN!

Team

The team is made up of game designers, programmers, mathematicians, musicians, old-school UNIX users, artists, and data wranglers. The whole team are, or have been, students or staff at the University of Tasmania.

Technical Overview

The game was developed using a combination of C# and JavaScript, compiled through the Mono development environment in the Unity game engine. The game runs on the web, through the Unity browser plugin, as well as natively on Mac, Windows, and Linux. That said, the game was designed in the spirit of tablet computers such as the iPad; in future development, the team plans to polish the game and deploy it to the popular tablet app marketplaces.

Art and visual design for the game was developed by the team using Pixelmator for OS X and a graphics tablet, and a minimal amount of 3D modeling using Blender. The visual design of the game was inspired by the Energy Rating labels present on appliances in Australia.

The Energy rating data was initially analysed using R to confirm that the distribution of ratings and features across products lent themselves to both easy comparisons between products and game mechanics. Following the data massaging in R, the data was manipulated in spreadsheets before finally being exported to JSON for use in the game.

Australian Post – Used to identify localities to link with the ABS data for the calculation of a players starting capital.

GovHack Categories

Best use of data.gov.au

Innovative pooling of ABS datasets with non-ABS datasets

Greatest Potential for Research Impact (Intersect)

Best of (General)

Best High Bandwidth Application for Digital Humanities

Innovative use of ABS

Best visual storytelling

National Beautiful Data Prize

Best Student Project

Spirit of GovHack

Most Aesthetically Awesome Hack

Missing Features

We wanted to (and even got the basics of) the data parsed to collect realtime electrical data costs and use this to influence the cost of appliances on a location by location basis.

We wanted to have people select their exact suburb and get given an income based on that the average income of that suburb.

We wanted to put in house upgrades such as solar panels or insulation that would improve the appliances or make them cheaper, the efficacy of the upgrades was going to be based on real world weather data from bom.gov.au

We wanted to implement a system of appliance rental, while cheaper than purchasing an appliance, the appliance only lasts one turn. We also wanted to have an emergency store, accessible at any time, but the same appliances would be much more expensive than at the normal store, which can only be used during the buying phase.

We wanted implement moving house, where you can buy a new house in a different neighbourhood. A house in a better neighbourhood, while expensive would increase the household income according to suburb average income data.

We wanted to add in-game expanations, to show the players how the energy rating and capacity of appliances they choose gives them advantages against their neighbour.

Next Steps

In addition to to implementing the missing features noted above, we plan to complete the game for the iPad (and other tablet platforms). We feel that the most appropriate platform for a game such as this is a tablet. Additionally, we'll be polishing the user experience, art, visual design, sound design, and use of data to optimise the gameplay experience and tune the game balance for optimal fun.

Slogans

Can you outsmart the capitalists, and Joe Blow next door and rise to the top of the heap?

Far in the future, next week, this will influence your choices, Learn the Lesson, Reap the Rewards.

Spot the trap, bigger is not better, light footprint, cheap and dependable is what you need.

Built to a price not to a standard.

Game Rules

It's not Rocket Appliance!

Phases

The game has 3 phases which represent a year of heavy appliance usage.
The phases are as follows:

The Purchase

The Battle

The Update

The Purchase Phase

The Purchase Phase is the time to buy new Appliances and Extend your House. Both Players can buy any number of Appliances or House Extensions from the Store, assuming the can pay for them.

The Battle Phase

The Battle Phase represents a year of hard, back and forth, whitegood combat. It consists of two stages of attacking, defending and unflooping in the order shown below:

Player 1 Attacks

Player 2 Defends

Player 2 Attacks

Player 1 Defends

Unfloop

Player 2 Attacks

Player 1 Defends

Player 1 Attacks

Player 2 Defends

Unfloop

Attack

In an Attack the Attacking Player chooses any number (including zero) unflooped Appliances and floops them. The total number of Energy Stas on the flooped Appliances is the attack value being dealt to the Defending Player.

Defend

In a Defense the Defending Player chooses any number (including zero) unflooped Appliances and floops them. The total Capacity of the flooped Appliances is the defense value to stop the Attack. If the difference between the Attack and Defense is greater than zero, the Defending Player looses Money.

Unfloop

In the unfloop stage, both players unfloop up to two flooped Appliances, showing their readiness to the continue the battle!

Winning

When a Player is reduced to zero Money they have gone broke, and the other Player is declared the Winner!

Update Phase

The Update Phase is when both Players regroup and prepare for another year of Appliance combat. In the Update Phase both Players decrease all Appliance Durability by one, any Appliance reduced to zero Durability has broken under wear and tear and is recycled and discarded. The Update Phase is when both Players recieve their income.

Appliances

An Appliance is your primary tool in the war against your neighbour and has a Cost, Energy Star Rating, Capacity, Durability, Type and Name.

Cost

Cost is how much an appliance costs to purchase and is based upon the real world running costs of the Appliance.

Energy Star Rating

The Energy Star Rating is the Attack value of the Appliance, and is based upon the real world energy rating of the Appliance.

Capacity

The Capacity of the Appliance is the Defense value of the Appliance and is based upon the real world capacity of the Appliance.

Durability

Durability is how reliable the Appliance is, all Appliances break over time, should an Appliance be reduced to zero Durability it is recycled and thrown away.

Type

The Type shows what kind of Appliance it is. An Appliance can only go into your House if there is space to support it. The different types are:

Air Conditioners

Washing Machine

Clothes Drier

Dishwasher

Television

Refrigerator

Name

The Name tells you what your lovely Appliance is called and is based on the real world name of the Appliance.

House

It's not a house, it's a home!
Your House is your fortress and base of operations in the war against your neighbour! Your House has a number of Application Slots and an Income.

Appliance Slots

Appliance Slots show how big your House is and how many Appliances you can hold. Each slot has a Type which corresponds to the Appliance Type, so a TV can only go into a TV slot, a Dishwasher into a Dishwasher slot and so on.

Upgrading your House

Sometimes your House just isn't big enough, from the Store you are able to buy an Extension to your House. The cost of the Extension is removed from your Money.

Income

Income is how much extra Money you get at the end of each year in the Update Phase. Your Income is based on your starting location, with more affluent areas having a higher Income.

Store

The Store is where you go to buy new Appliances or Extenstions to your House. The Store has a random selection of Appliances everytime you visit. The Store can only be visited during the Purchase Phase.

Flooping

Flooping and Unflooping is how you show which Appliances are engaged. To Floop an Appliance rotate it 90 degrees and to Unfloop, rotate it back 90 degrees. A flooped Appliance can not be used until it is Unflooped.

Software and Asset License

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.